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The virus spy

On 17 April, Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was called in to help diagnose a cluster of cases of serious respiratory illness of unknown cause in Mexico. This was molecular virologist Yan Li's forte; his team was the first to identify and report the SARS coronavirus in Canada during the 2003 outbreak. Hannah Hoag talks to Li and to the laboratory's scientific director Frank Plummer about being the first to identify the Mexican virus as influenza, and about the laboratory's research into swine flu.